Can Bookstores be Saved?

I like bookstores. I savor being in a place with book-lined walls. I love the covers, the titles, the blurbs. Some bookstores have jazz playing in the background. Some have coffeeshops. I like reading some pages of a magazine I don’t usually read, and deciding whether to buy it or even to subscribe. I like author signings and readings.

I am therefore distressed at the closing of Borders Books.. There are ironies in this story, since Borders (based in my home, Ann Arbor), pioneered the concept of the book superstore, putting many independent bookstores out of business. It in turn was driven into bankruptcy in part by the rise of the digital book, and its inability to adapt to the new technology in the way that Amazon and Barnes and Noble have. The story I heard about the superstore is that one of the Borders brothers took a computer class in the 1970s and realized that inventory could be computerized. Bookstores used to order 5 copies of each new book they wanted to carry, which limited the actual number of titles on their shelves, say to 20,000 in a big store. By ordering just one copy of each book, and reordering when that copy sold (made possible by tracking sales via computer), Borders could have 100,000 discrete titles. The flagship store in Ann Arbor had 160,000, I think.

My people, Americans, are frankly not generally big book readers. Apparently once they get out of college, a lot of them do not read much for pleasure. Airplane travelers, at least, used to read, to pass the time on planes. But now you see them watching movies on tidy little DVD players, and some airlines are even making the internet available on flights, so that people read and reply to work email instead of relaxing with a novel. Of course, by blogging I am probably guilty of undermining book reading. A daily essay of 800 words is easier to fit into most people’s schedule than even part of 300-page book.

I admire the people in Barcelona for their Sant Jordi (St. George) commemoration, every year on April 23. In honor of St. George, lovers exchange a book and a rose with one another. I read in La Vanguardia that 50 percent of all books sold annually in Catalonia are sold on Sant Jordi Day. What a wonderful idea, instead of further enriching that awful de Beers monopoly on hardened carbon crystals, to give a book to express one’s love and passion. And a rose. I even tried to promote April 23 a la Barcelone, but didn’t have many takers. The advantage of tying books to romance is obvious, and physical books would make better gifts, helping that medium survive. Oh, well.

Unlike some book lovers, I rather enjoy digital books, and often read on my iPhone or iPad (the advantage of Kindle or other book readers on my iPhone is that I usually have it with me. I have bad eyesight, but find that if I set down the brightness from factory settings and set up the size of the font, I can read perfectly comfortably on the smaller machine). One advantage of digital books is that they can be downloaded anywhere. I was traveling not so long ago in Andalucia and wanted to read about its history. I had access to books via Kindle etc. that I could never have actually found in Seville, e.g.

As an author, I was proud that my recent book, Engaging the Muslim World, was for a while the best-selling digital book for the American division of Palgrave Macmillan, presumably because my blog readers are unusually wired.

Much as I like bookstores, they have disadvantages for publishers and authors because of the way the business works. Typically the bookstores don’t have to pay for the book until they sell it, and if they don’t sell it the can send it back. Sometimes the books are damaged when returned. In contrast, when someone buys a digital book, the publisher gets paid right then and there. Digital publishing is therefore potentially good for publishers and authors, disastrous for bookstores.

But I would deeply regret the loss of places where exemplars of printed books can be browsed, paged, and sniffed at (new books smell good). Although Kindle lets you download a sample of a digital book, it isn’t the same as being able to browse. And bookstores are centers for a community, of readers, which are now in danger of being lost.

What I can’t understand is why bookstores don’t just develop an app. Why can’t you have a physical, printed book tagged in a way that you can take a photo of the zebra code with an iPhone or Android smartphone (in the same way you can use a Paypal app to photograph a check for deposit). The app. would download the book from a server, and the price would include a fee for the bookstore providing the physical copy for examination. In this way, you could still buy a digital book from a bookstore in a way, or at least remunerate the bookstore for having books to examine in hard copy. I can’t understand why such a system could not inexpensively be implemented by independent and specialty bookstores as well as by superstores. Obviously, readers might pay an extra dollar or so for a book bought this way as opposed to those downloaded directly from, e.g., Amazon. But that would be a small price to pay for the survival of bookstores, and it is more fun to make on-the-spot book purchases after you leaf through the book, than it is to do purely digital shopping on the web. If the idea is feasible, the developers may have it gratis. I just want my bookstores back.